For years, Christian supremacist ideology was coursing through American conservatism. Now it—and its antisemitism—is out in the open, in the halls of power and scaring Jews.

In the second week of July 2024, in Washington, DC, it was hard to tell exactly where the country was headed. President Joe Biden, fresh off a disastrous debate performance but still pushing for another term, told a meeting of NATO leaders that the United States and its allies had a “sacred obligation” to defend democracies under attack. Donald Trump, days away from an assassination attempt and then his nomination at the Republican National Convention, secured a GOP platform that was more moderate than what social conservatives wanted, with a softened stance on abortion and no mention of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s controversial blueprint for a second Trump term. Trump said he hadn’t bothered to read it.

What got less media attention that week, but deserved more, was a three-day “National Conservatism” conference at the Capital Hilton Hotel a half mile north of the White House. The conference highlighted an increasingly dominant strain of conservative thought centered on the promotion of America’s white European and Christian heritage and an America First nationalism. Speakers attacked globalism and advocated for greater Christian influence in the country’s social and political institutions. Several Project 2025 contributors were there, as well as eight Republican senators. Among them was JD Vance of Ohio, not yet revealed as Trump’s choice for vice president but a clear front-runner for the position after exchanging his sober anti-Trump politics of a few years earlier for a newly combative posture defending Trump’s most controversial positions.

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Some Jewish students, including reporters and editors, viewed post-October 7 coverage by campus newspapers as biased. Their concerns largely went unheard.

Throughout her first three years at a small liberal arts college on the East Coast, nothing mattered more to her than her work on the student newspaper. Already interested in writing, “Rachel” arrived on campus in the COVID fall of 2020, with students largely confined to their dormitories and all classes conducted online. Only after joining the newspaper staff was she able to meet a few other students and feel some connection to her new college community. In her sophomore year, with the campus coming back to life, she saw the newspaper as her “home base,” the place where she established her closest friendships and did her most meaningful work. In her junior year, she was named one of the editors. Two or three nights a week, the group would gather at the paper’s office to discuss and review stories together, share dinner and socialize until midnight or later. “I looked forward to those nights,” she says. “It was my favorite thing. I loved it so much.”

But in the fall of her senior year, the October 7 massacre and the subsequent campus protests shook up her college community, disturbing many Jewish students like herself. Rachel is not her real name, and she doesn’t want her college identified. Even in her previously cozy student newsroom, she felt increasingly out of place, distressed by the deep hostility to Israel evident in some of the news stories and op-eds the other editors were approving for publication and by a willingness to downplay Hamas terrorism.

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